Build a house that can 'love you back'

This image was taken from Elke Cole's website, and the little inspiration that follows. Elke is a 'Social Entrepreneur in Natural Building' which sounds good to me, and she seems to have been involved in some beautiful projects.

Elke wrote a list of 10 ways in which your house can “love you back” which I really like:

• it offers you shelter from the elements
• it keeps you connected to Nature
• it supports your health through superior indoor climate
• it provides plenty of daylight for all your activities
• it helps keep you grounded
• it supports your personal flow of daily actions by design
• it gives you pleasure through its beauty
• it is energetically aligned with you through your participation in the building process
• it is easy on your bankbook through smart space design
• it stimulates your creativity through organic form

There's more on Elke's original blog post which is worth a read, and maybe you might want to ask for her help, or commission her...

Passive Solar Greenhouses - A DIY Design Guide

I'm getting this free ebook in my email by instalments at the moment, and I really appreciate it's insights and quality so far.

It's written and published by Rob & Michelle Avis at Verge Permaculture in Calgary, Canada. Their website is www.vergepermaculture.ca (really good, loads of good resources) or click here for more info about getting the ebook.

The two rather random things I really like are:

1. All the references to dealing with snow, for example the load it can place on the roof, the angle of the roof for avoiding snow build-up, and the design of the knee wall to deal with snow. These are the kinds of details you rarely get in most of the literature I've seen where permaculture sites are in much warmer climes...

2. There's a real emphasis on good graphic design as well as good content. There's a huge need for permaculture to become more mainstream - for hundreds of millions of people to be using it in their daily lives. For this to happen the material needs to be good, and it needs to appeal to people who've grown up in the age of mass advertising. Of course this isn't the only reason for good design - design makes things more accessible in many ways too.

You can also see this emphasis on good graphic design on www.overgrowthesystem.com which Verge Permaculture are also associated with. Check it out - looks great.

Resiliency and Regeneration Principles

I've just written my first review on Amazon. I know I shouldn't really use Amazon, but it is a good resource for checking things out and reading reviews, plus my account with them allows me to earn small referral fees - so if you buy a book after following a link from this site I can get a little closer to my dream (although so far I haven't earned enough in two years for them to bother sending me a cheque!).

Anyway I reviewed The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach by Ben Falk. I mentioned this in my recent post Looking forward to some good eating, and now I've got the book and I'm loving it. I said in my review that there are big chunks that I want to type out and put in this blog - particularly a piece about dwelling on the land and cultivating nut trees with an understorey of plants and animals - and getting massive long term returns on investment.

For now I'm going to list Ben's Resiliency and Regeneration Principles. I really need to get these into my head, and do quite a lot of work and thinking through many of them, and this is the first stage for me. Of course you need to buy the book to read all his extra notes, I'm just going to list the headings.

Resiliency and Regeneration Design

1. Maximum outputs for minimum inputs
2. Transform dead matter into living
3. System establishment vs. system maintenance
4. Biological complexity, technological symplicity
5. Resilience = diversity x redundancy x connectivity x manageability
6. Regeneration metric = biomass and biodiversity
7. Facilitate the vital force
8. Human management = primary limiting factor
9. Stress as stimulus
10. Responsiveness, not habit
11. Human resource x site characteristics = ideal site design
12. All design should be modular
13. Structural diversity begets biological diversity
14. Habits of mind
15. Spread pulses
16. Disperse and extend fertility
17. Land as value distillation tool
18. Multiply functions from single expenditures (always do or get two or more results)
19. Moving things is entropy
20. Value across time
21. Essential functions provided by multiple elements
22. Simplest solution is the best solution
23. Efficiency does not equal resiliency
24. Increase diversity, don't reduce it
25. Quality-quantity relationship
26. Scale and proportions are the most difficult
27. Oil intervention
28. Probability x impact = risk
29. Niches in time
30. Zone 1 site mimic
31. Past is precedent

Resiliency and Regeneration Habits of Mind

32. Good design always empowers
33. Passive vs active observation
34. Observation action chronology
35. Two is one, one is none
36. Character of work over time of work
37. Immerse in abundance
38. Maximise site awareness
39. Embedding skills and practice in daily routine
40. Skills = most durable resource
41. Awareness limits action
42. Environment limits and manifests action
43. Solutions = alignment
44. Figure it out: try stuff
45. Miracles everywhere

Food and Fertility

46. Constant organic matter accumulation
47. Paths as biomass producers
48. Seed often and lightly
49. Passive forage-ability
50. Plant as densely as you can afford to
51. Animals above plants
52. Pee on plants (or next to plants)
53. Swales everywhere

Ecology and Management

54. Disturbance stimulates yield
55. Succession determined by disturbance and its aftermath
56. Fill open niches immediately
57. Systems establishment overshooting management capacity
58. Biology in place of technology
59. Annual-perennial balance in system
60. Modularity and agility
61. Ecosystem partnering, not stewardship
62. Partnering with vigour
63. Sculptable landscape
64. Native to when
65. Cheap tools are too costly
66. Quality of work affects labour and management capacity
67. Apply present resources now
68. Storage always runs out
69. House as water tower
70. House as dehydrator
71. Clarity points and leverage points in time
72. Principles are only useful if actually followed!

There are several things I like about this list. It is fairly familiar and comfortable for me, although it also contains quite a few new ideas, good reminders, and challenges. Some of the headings remind me of the sort of thing Christopher Alexander writes in his book A Pattern Language which I also love (and Ben quotes). And I like the mix of fairly obvious headings with some intriguing ones and others that seem wrong on the face of it until you read the notes.

Now I've typed all of these out I think I'll create a little spreadsheet for myself where I'll go through them and make extra notes that I need to think about for Orchardy Haven. I also need to read through this section of the book again to refresh my memory on some of the points. I'm sure I'll be returning to this book again and again over the coming years for inspiration and guidance.

Miracle Farms, a 5-acre commercial permaculture orchard in Southern Queb...

This is great, and in southern Quebec I bet they have cold winters like us in Podlasie...